Blockchain-based Object Name Service with Tokenized Authority

Abstract

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is applied everywhere, providing tremendous amounts of IoT service. The GS1, a non-profit international standards organization, has established standards for IoT technology. Especially, the GS1 standardized an Object Name Service (ONS) leveraging DNS's distributed and federated infrastructure, enables users to manage and discover IoT services such as the retail, food, healthcare, smart city, and so on. However, the ONS is vulnerable to the data tampering, privilege escalation, and service fault caused by DNS attacks including the man in the middle, cache poisoning, replay, hijacking, and denial of service attacks. Nowadays, IoT services are used in security-sensitive areas, such as finance and healthcare. Therefore, the security of ONS should be strengthened before causing severe problems such as data breach, economic loss, and social loss. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based ONS with a tokenized authority called the BlockONS. The BlockONS provides strength in the data tampering and privilege escalation allowing a fault tolerance. The BlockONS consists of a content off-chain scaling, a data tampering validation method, a fault-tolerance method, and a Blockchain Token-Based Access Control (BTBAC) method. We designed the BlockONS into two parts: A BlockONS Node part manages the validation method and BTBAC model. A BlockONS Agent part manages the off-chain scaling and fault tolerance. Finally, we implemented the BlockONS leveraging a Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain. We proved the proposed validation method, fault tolerance method, and BTBAC method through use cases and security analyses on attack situations. We deployed the BlockONS in the Daejeon city and evaluated the performance to show the feasibility of the BlockONS.